George Hoyt Whipple

George Hoyt Whipple (1878-1976), American physician, pathologist, educator, and Nobel Prize winner. Whipple studied the process by which the liver breaks down hemoglobin—the iron-containing protein in red blood cells that allows the cells to carry oxygen—to form bile, a substance that aids in the digestion of fat. Whipple, along with American physicians George Richards Minot and William Parry Murphy, were awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their discovery that feeding liver to anemia patients cured the disease.

Born in Ashland, New Hampshire, Whipple attended Yale University and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, receiving his M.D. degree in 1905. Whipple taught at Johns Hopkins until 1914, when he accepted a position at the University of California, San Francisco. In 1920 he became dean of the University of California Medical School, but left the next year to help establish the medical and dental schools at the University of Rochester, New York.

When Whipple began his research on the relationship between the liver, hemoglobin, and bile around 1910, it was believed that the breakdown of hemoglobin into bile occurred only in the liver. By surgically isolating the liver in laboratory dogs, Whipple showed that bile continued to form in the bloodstream without help from the liver. Later, Whipple and his colleagues extracted blood from laboratory dogs, thereby inducing anemia (a disorder in which the bone marrow fails to produce a sufficient number of mature red blood cells) in the animals. By carefully monitoring the dogs' hemoglobin levels and feeding the animals special diets, Whipple was able to study the process of hemoglobin loss and regeneration over several years. He found that when the dogs were fed liver, their hemoglobin levels were restored. Whipple's work made possible advances in the mid-1920s by George Richards Minot and William Parry Murphy, who pioneered the use of liver in the treatment of anemia in humans. As a result of his own findings and the work of Minot and Murphy, Whipple later worked with the pharmaceutical firm Eli Lilly and Company to develop a liver extract for use as a dietary supplement and treatment for anemia.